Ann Coulter trots out a new image

Wednesday

Oct 13, 2010 at 2:10 PMOct 13, 2010 at 2:16 PM

By LAURA M. HOLSONNew York Times News Service

“I wrote a new speech for the gays and I don’t have it memorized yet!” Ann Coulter said as she ducked into a hallway in the Union Square apartment of the venture capitalist Peter Thiel on a recent Saturday night, flicking a half-empty packet of Habitrol gum between her fingers. She was there to speak at Homocon 2010, a party for the first anniversary of GOProud, the Washington-based advocacy group for gay conservatives.For a right-wing, evangelical Christian who has made fun of homosexuals and opposes same-sex marriage, Coulter seemed awfully ... game. Wearing a black lace-up cocktail dress and high black heels, she posed for a photograph with the founder of Boy Butter, a maker of sex lubricants. She joked about her fellow conservatives. “Yes, that was Elton John at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding, not Velma from ‘Scooby-Doo,’” she said, as listeners chuckled. She warmly greeted a pornographic film director, and admired the “freedom is fabulous” T-shirt worn by one volunteer. “Can you be gay and conservative?” she shouted at the mostly male crowd, many of whose shirt collars were soaked with sweat after the air-conditioning had faltered. “You have to be!” Conservatives, she surmised, are tough on the war against Islamic terrorists. “And you know what the Muslims do to gays,” she said, flashing a knowing look.Coulter has made a lucrative career out of being the outspoken, sometimes outrageous Cassandra of the far right, denouncing a group of New Jersey 9/11 widows for what she saw as enjoying their husbands’ deaths too much; using an anti-gay epithet to describe Sen. John Edwards; and blaming the mainstream media for conspiring against God-fearing Christians. Now that members of the Tea Party movement have stolen much of her thunder, Coulter is taking some surprising new positions. She called the decision to send more troops into Afghanistan “insane,” warning that it could be a new Vietnam. She has decried fellow Republicans for continuing to insist that President Barack Obama is Muslim. And perhaps most startling, she wants to bring more gay Republicans into the conservative fold.“Except for me, they are the most politically incorrect people you will ever meet,” Coulter, 48, said one recent evening over a glass of pinot grigio at a hotel bar after a speech in Raleigh, N.C.. Capitalizing on her flamboyant, anything-goes persona, she has gone so far as to describe herself as “the right-wing Judy Garland.”“Among gay conservatives, she is an icon,” said Christopher Barron, chairman of GOProud’s board, who spoke at Homocon. “We could not think of anyone who we would want to party with more.” Jimmy LaSalvia, the group’s executive director, exclaimed: “Just look at her shoes!”“She likes to poke the left to get the PC police fired up,” he added. “But you know what? We do the same thing.”Well, not exactly. What drives Coulter, she said, even more than her hatred of liberals, is an overriding belief that she is doing God’s work. “I’d be disappointed if liberals did not spit their drinks out when they heard my name,” she said. “That’s kind of what I’m shooting for. But that does not relate to the reality of me. It relates to me creating a reaction in godless traitors.”Coulter, a former constitutional lawyer, said she has spent considerable time researching marriage and gay rights. She boasted of having several gay friends. She has a gay cousin, too, though she said she hasn’t seen him in two decades and wrote in an e-mail that “he has less impact on what I think about gay issues than Nathan Lane.” (“excellent performer!” she wrote.) “Everybody wants a gay neighbor,” Coulter said. Of conservatives, she added enthusiastically, “We’ve always liked gays!”But the sudden zeal might strike some as an opportunistic grab for a spotlight that has faded somewhat since the early 2000s, when she cut a swath through the mainstream media. “I happen to think that Ann believes everything she says,” said Bill Maher, the host of “Real Time,” who is a friend. But at the same time, “it is a bunch of show business. You are working in the media. You are in makeup.” For a person like Coulter, Maher said, “once they are in the public eye, they don’t want to be irrelevant.”Coulter was born in 1961, the youngest of three children in suburban New Canaan, Conn., where she was schooled early in Republican politics. Her father was an ex-FBI agent and labor lawyer; her mother, a homemaker from Kentucky active in the Daughters of the American Revolution. Coulter’s older brother, John Coulter, recalled a dinnertime debate when Ann Coulter was 8 and the family argued over whether states should help pay for private education. The family agreed they were against it. She was baptized Catholic, like her father, but never confirmed. She now attends a Protestant church, like her mother did. “I tormented my mother by saying I didn’t believe in God when I was a teenager,” she said.Coulter graduated from Cornell in 1985 and got a degree from the University of Michigan’s law school. (“She couldn’t wait to get out of the sticks of Connecticut,” her brother said.) She worked at Cahill Gordon & Reindel in New York and, briefly, at a public interest firm in Washington, and hated both. “At a big law firm you are doing so much mindless work and so much suck-uppery,” she said. “And I am not a suck-up kind of person.”In short order, Coulter seized upon becoming a political commentator, starting a column in 1998 — now a popular offering on conservative websites — and publishing her first book, “High Crimes and Misdemeanors: The Case Against Bill Clinton.”Television then was rife with mostly stodgy male pundits, and her knack for the provocative sound bite proved compelling. “We didn’t have the archetype of the combative, feisty female pundit,” said Heather Higgins, a childhood friend.Not everyone was enthralled with her rise to fame. “I just think it’s a waste of great talent,” said Bob Guccione Jr., the founder of Spin magazine, who dated Coulter in the late 1990s, smitten by her good looks and sharp wit. “She could have argued cases before the Supreme Court.” Instead, he said, she was consumed by politics — particularly the undoing of Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair — using her column and television appearances to further her conservative agenda. (Coulter said that helping impeach Clinton was one of her greatest achievements.)“I think she was aware she had a shtick and she knew it was good,” Guccione said.Coulter lives mainly in Florida, but has apartments in New York and Los Angeles, where she has a network of friends with whom she dines and debates politics. Around 4 a.m. each Tuesday, she e-mails a draft of her column to about a dozen she calls “the circle of deciders,” seeking input, though she frequently disregards their suggestions. “Whenever I have hysterical messages on my answering machine telling me not to release my column, I think, ‘This is going to be a good one,’” she said.She wakes about noon and doesn’t like to talk on the telephone. “My boyfriends never get it,” she said. (Even her brother said he doesn’t know her phone number.) If she has a steady, she won’t say who. “I’m kind of like Jack Nicholson in ‘The Shining,’” she said. “It’s a little bit weird how utterly, laughably solitary I am.” That’s partly because her schedule is so demanding.“I was dating a Jew when I was writing ‘Treason’ and I was very busy, and his friends asked if he went to church with me,” she said. “And he said yes, because he knew it was the only time he would see me.” Indeed, dating Ann Coulter Inc., it seems, can be a little intimidating for prospective suitors. Coulter said a recent date in Beverly Hills ended with the man blurting: “I was so nervous. Could you tell?” (She reassured him.)“Is it a problem to find a man when you are Ann Coulter?” asked Elinor Burkett, who directed a 2004 documentary about Coulter. “The ego has to be totally intact. Also, she has to be the center of attention. For a lot of conservative men she is way out of the box.”Whatever Coulter’s own situation, she clearly has ideas about others. She has declared that she believes marriage serves one purpose: the rearing of children by a mother and a father. (“Marriage is not a civil right,” she told the largely gay audience at Homocon, adding, “You’re not black.”)“I have friends who are married, gays with kids, and I wish them the best,” she said. “But this is a point about society. People love gays, they don’t want gay marriage.” Instead, she reasoned, “we ought to be doing everything for a man and a woman who pledge to live their lives together and raise children.”“And by the way,” she added later, “I love to have lots of theories about married people and how they raise their children. But it’s so much easier when you can have a cocktail and go home.”Three weeks ago, Coulter, after getting stuck on the tarmac in Dallas, where she had spoken at a Tea Party rally the day before, was an hour and a half late to a speech to the Wake County Republican Women’s Club in Raleigh, N.C. When she walked onstage at the North Ridge Country Club, wearing a black frock somewhat more modest than the one she would choose for Homocon, the nearly 600 attendees leaped to their feet and cheered so loudly it could be heard in the parking lot. Coulter proceeded to deliver a string of stinging below-the-Bible-Belt zingers.“As the leader of 12 Apostles, even Jesus had more experience than Obama!” she shouted. The crowd roared. Of the proposed Islamic center near ground zero, she said, “What if they built it in the shape of an extended middle finger?” And when she brought up the recent sniping among her fellow Republicans, an apparent madcap contest of who could be the most outrageous conservative, she laughed loudly. “I want to sit back with a bowl of popcorn!” Coulter shouted, prompting the night’s fourth standing ovation.The performance was part stand-up, part put-down, part church revival.“She’s a great entertainer,” said Robbie Armistead, a longtime Republican who enthusiastically shouted “Yah!” several times during Coulter’s speech. “I watch her on Fox News and she cracks me up.”Ninety percent of Coulter’s income comes from speeches like these. (The Wake County club paid her about $25,000, said one of the organizers.) She spends six to 12 weeks on the speaking circuit each year, divided equally between the busy spring and fall seasons, ramping it up if she has a book to promote, as she will next year, on a yet-to-be-disclosed topic. “When I have a book out, I will do anything,” Coulter said. “I will do garage radio.”Coulter’s embrace of gay conservatives is not encouraged by all corners of the extreme right. Joseph Farah, the editor of the conservative website WorldNetDaily.com, which has published Coulter’s column for 13 years, dropped her as a keynote speaker at his Miami conference last month. He claimed she betrayed her conservative values in speaking to GOProud, which supports gay marriage. He, too, thought her celebrity was being exploited.“She took it badly and the next thing I know she’s on television calling me a fake Christian,” Farah said. (Coulter said she had not had a signed contract to speak and was upset because Farah published their correspondence about Homocon.)Maybe Farah was on to something, at least about the publicity. GOProud’s chairman, Barron, defended the decision to have Coulter speak at its party, saying: “It’s a branding opportunity.” The nascent organization got its money’s worth with Coulter; the blogosphere lighted up with commentary after the event. But not every attendee was thrilled with her appearance.“She makes me laugh,” said Chris Williamson, a television marketing executive who went to the event with a friend. “But people outside New York and Los Angeles will take this as truth. It’s dangerous.” At the same time, several gay websites chided Coulter for the “civil right” remark.On a recent Thursday, after a late taping of “The Sean Hannity Show,” Coulter sounded almost weary discussing her critics. “It was more fun when I was lesser known,” she said. “The rule of the road is you never attack down, you always attack up. Now I have all these peons attacking me and I have to not respond. And it’s fun to respond.” She said she recently got an e-mail from a friend who was chastised for taking a public position on a Christian issue. “He said, ‘How do you get used to being hated by so many people?’” Coulter said.She had some trouble with her reply. “My first paragraph was bubbling over with how fun it was to be hated by liberals,” she said. “And then I realized, at the end of it, maybe I am getting too into being hated by liberals.”